


The Hunter's Heart, The Hunter's Mouth

by shellfishDimes



Category: Far Cry (Video Games), Far Cry 4
Genre: Hallucinations, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-17
Updated: 2015-07-17
Packaged: 2018-04-09 13:05:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4349882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shellfishDimes/pseuds/shellfishDimes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He stands up, looking frantically around to find an exit, hoping this cave won't loop around on itself and send him straight into the arms of the hissing Rakshasa, and his breathing and his heartbeat is so loud that they'll hear, they'll probably hear. But then he sees the lamps on the floor and the broken yellow pottery by his feet, and this is Kyrat, it's not Shangri-La, and he's got his guns and his radio, and he remembers the way out.</p>
<p>"Sabal, I got Yuma," he tells the radio, his voice stronger than he feels. He doesn't hear what Sabal says in return, from the whooshing in his ears, from the pounding of his heart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Hunter's Heart, The Hunter's Mouth

**Author's Note:**

> **TRIGGER WARNINGS** : emetophobia, disassociation, derealisation, hallucinations. if these things trigger you, please do NOT read this!

His vision is blurred and the cave is dark and he can barely see, and his throat seizes up because what if his eyes will stay like this forever, but then as he sits up, head swimming, eyes stinging, things come into focus — his feet, the floor of the cave, Yuma's body, the khukri in his hand, the pool of blood on the ground, the blood on his jeans, the blood on his hands, the blood everywhere.

He stands up, looking frantically around to find an exit, hoping this cave won't loop around on itself and send him straight into the arms of the hissing Rakshasa, and his breathing and his heartbeat is so loud that they'll hear, they'll probably hear. But then he sees the lamps on the floor and the broken yellow pottery by his feet, and this is Kyrat, it's not Shangri-La, and he's got his guns and his radio, and he remembers the way out.

"Sabal, I got Yuma," he tells the radio, his voice stronger than he feels. He doesn't hear what Sabal says in return, from the whooshing in his ears, from the pounding of his heart. 

When he turns his head, it takes his brain a couple of second longer to follow, and it feels like it's floating around in the confines of his skull, like his brain is in a liquid-filled glass jar too big for it, sloshing around and bouncing against the sides. He walks to the mouth of the cave, feeling his way along the walls the entire time, dragging his gloved fingers along the coarsely hewn stone to ground himself, remind himself he's _here,_ in Kyrat, all of him is here and that if he scrapes himself on the rock, it'll hurt and he'll tear his gloves, and that he's _real,_ and this is all real. It helps with the dizziness, having something solid to lean on, and it even helps when he stumbles on unsteady feet and bangs his shoulder, because the pain that explodes in his muscle and bone and spreads down his arm and up his neck is a reminder that this is all real and not a result of Yuma blowing coloured powder in his face, and that the stone he's touching is Kyrati stone, and not dreams, and not Shangri-La. 

The moment he's out of the cave, he's on his knees and vomiting. He's shaking head to toe, barely able to keep himself upright for long enough to get the bile out of his mouth. His fingers grip the ground, tangled in the dew-kissed grass of the early morning, and with every blade they pull out he feels like his grip on the world has lessened, like if he pulls too hard, the delicate illusion he's cocooned in will shatter and he'll fall through the ground and into a world of blood red, snow white and statues that turn their heads to look at him as he passes. 

He barely drags himself to the car. He falls into the driver's seat and grips the wheel, fingers suddenly so tingly and numb he can't properly grip the keys and start the engine. He tries to focus on something again, like his breathing that's coming ragged and quick, like he'd run a mile — and he could have done, because the way from the cave to the car is fuzzy in his memory — like the cloying smell of the blue flowers rotting on the dash, like the feeling of his hands gripping the steering wheel, and the blood on his hands, the blood on his gloves, the blood everywhere.

He hears a yell, and he lets go of the wheel like he's been burned, wiping his hands on the passenger seat. The yell might have been his, because then he's stumbling back out of the car, breathing through his mouth and trying not to smell Yuma's blood that's all over him. 

He slumps against the car, feeling the cool metal and glass against his back, and he doesn't want to call Sabal, he really doesn't, but he's shaking and he feels like he'll start throwing up again even though there's nothing left in his stomach. When he looks around, the trees seem taller, further away, more red somehow, and there were the starved-looking, demon dogs and their mad, frothing jaws trying to get at him, and he's still got so much to _do,_ he can't die in a forest scared out of his mind. 

He sinks to the ground, leaning against the back wheel of the car, and after a while — minutes? hours? — he manages to get someone on the radio.

"Hey. It's—" _Kalinag—_ "It's Ajay," he says, breathing relief that he remembered it for long enough to say it, so he repeats it, "It's Ajay, Ajay Ghale. I'm— I don't know where I am, it's by a cave. There's a statue in it. There's— I got Yuma." That at least is certain, that at least he remembers. _Sabal, I got Yuma,_ and his yelling, and her dead body, and her blood. "I need someone to come get me." 

He sits with his head leaning on the dark grey metal of the car, half-rusted with age and neglect and rapidly heating up as the day goes on and the sun grows hotter and climbs taller in the sky. He holds his bow in his hands, arrow nocked, waiting, waiting, waiting. He closes his eyes against the light because he can feel a headache coming on, pressing at the back of his skull, slowly pounding away at his hindbrain. He keeps breathing through his mouth, counting his breaths, counting the laces on his shoes, the tears on his jeans, waiting, waiting, waiting. 

They turn up, eventually, three of them. The blue on their clothes looks like coloured powder, and their faces look like eyeless masks. Their voices sound like spitting ash and dust, until they don't, and he sees they're people, and they're Golden Path, and he lowers his bow.

They put him into the back of their truck. He sits with his hands between his thighs, eyes focused on the torn fabric of the seat in front of him. Everything is fuzzy, like the world is a painting with the edges rubbed out until the shapes are unrecognisable, viewed in a dark room. They're saying something, talking amongst themselves, asking him questions, but their voices echo around him and their words never reach him in any language he can understand. 

And then they're out of the car, and he can hardly remember how they got there or how long it took them. The buildings look familiar, but after a while, all the outposts start to look the same to Ajay and he isn't sure to which one they've taken him. There's other people around, Golden Path and villagers, and Ajay has to look at them really well, concentrate really hard not to see the metal masks and the white, white limbs of the Rakshasa. 

Unlike the rest of them, he recognises Sabal immediately. Sabal's eyes widen when he sees him, and he's at his side in an instant. Ajay lets him take his arm and put it around his shoulders. He thinks of Sabal from the vision, voice hard, shoulders tight, and he tries to make sense of that Sabal compared to the Sabal walking him to the safe house now, gentle and careful, like Ajay might snap under too much pressure.

"Sabal," he says, and his voice sounds rough with lack of use. He has no idea how long he waited for the Golden Path to come get him. Hours? Days?

"I'm here, brother," Sabal assures him. 

"I got Yuma," he says, clinging onto what he knows is real.

"And you made it out alive, thank the Gods," Sabal says, and Ajay remembers him saying, _When you sided with Amita, you chose to desecrate your own heritage, and spit on the Gods,_ and how he didn't even blink at the people falling dead at his feet. "I have never known anyone to survive what you have with such strength," he says, easing Ajay down onto the bed. Hand still on his shoulder, Sabal gets down on his haunches in front of him. "Let me have a look at you."

Ajay turns his head to look at him. This isn't like after Durgesh, when Sabal looked happy and relieved to see him awake. This time, there's a line of worry between Sabal's eyebrows. His mouth is downturned, and it quickly turns into a deep frown when he takes a better look at the blood on Ajay's jacket, the blood on his hands, the blood on his jeans, Yuma's blood. Ajay's mind echoes with Sabal's words, spat through teeth clenched with fury, _You committed crimes against the Gods themselves!_

"You're shaking," the Sabal in this room says, and then both his hands are on Ajay's face, warm and solid and _real,_ and he's saying, "Ajay, look at me. You're okay." Ajay looks at him, and when their eyes meet, he can breathe a bit more easily, almost normally. There's a ringing in his head like a car alarm going off in the silence of the night, but it dies down to almost a whisper when he feels Sabal's fingertips on his cheeks. His thumbs are so near the corners of Ajay's mouth that he wishes Sabal would move them a little closer, that he'd hold him like that a little longer. There must be something of that visible in his eyes, because Sabal's eyebrows raise just a fraction, the corner of his mouth twists up in a smile, and his voice is coloured with fondness and relief as he says, "See? You're okay."

"I feel like—" _red trees and white mud and yellow flowers and stone grinding at the edge of his hearing as Kyra turns her head to look at him—_ "I don't know what's in my head and what's real," Ajay says. "She drugged me with something."

Sabal's face darkens, and Ajay almost reaches for his khukri because he remembers Sabal's expression from earlier, the deadpan way he said, _Today, you chose to cut your own throats, not me,_ with such surety that it left no room for anything but feeling like death was the only way out of the shame and guilt that came with blaspheming against your gods. Ajay tightens his fists and he's ready to punch Sabal, reach for a weapon and defend himself should Sabal try anything, because he's not dying on his knees. 

Sabal touches his hands, fingers on his wrists. The hard lines of his face smooth out, the line of worry between his eyebrows almost disappears. Everything about the way the light falls on his face, the depths of his eyes, the slightly chapped skin of his lips says _trust me,_ and Ajay's fists unclench just enough that his fingers aren't digging painfully into his palms.

"You're real, Ajay," Sabal says, voice going all quiet and deep as he presses his thumb on Ajay's pulse point, so that Ajay can feel his heart thumping against Sabal's skin. The edges of Ajay's vision come into sharper focus as Sabal says, "This is real," and he trusts him.

Sabal looks down. Ajay thinks he's looking at their hands, and he feels a twinge of something in his chest, but then he realises Sabal is looking at his gloves, covered in dried blood. Some of it got on his skin where his sleeve is rolled back, and none of it is his, and all of it is Yuma's. His head feels like the inside of pincushion, tiny stabs of pain hammering on the inside of his cranium, sharp and sudden and terrifying like the sizzling pain of grease spitting from a hot pan and hitting your skin. He struggles not to look up for fear that he'll see her crawling crab-like along the ceiling, her head turned around to face him, her face on the back of her head where no face should be. At the same time, he wants to look up to assure himself that she's not there, that she's lying dead on the floor of a cave.

"Ajay," says Sabal, and Ajay turns his eyes on him again, and the world is almost the right shape. "You should take off those clothes. Get someone to wash them." He gets to his feet, his hands leaving Ajay's. "We have some spare uniforms you can wear," he says, pointing to a brightly painted dresser.

Sabal's hand is on the door when Ajay thinks to say, "Thank you." Sabal pauses, half turned towards Ajay, half towards the door he's pushing open.

"Of course," Sabal simply says, bowing his head in acknowledgement. "We owe you much more than that," he says before leaving and shutting the door behind him. 

Even though the small room is crammed with things — bright bales of fabric, a worn down table and scuffed chairs, fire-blackened pots, canned food with labels Ajay can't read, used tallow candles, bright things hanging from the walls that tinkle when the air shifts and moves them, dressers packed with clothes, medicine, first aid kits, some of them open and missing things, some of them still closed and wearing the International Red Cross logo, dozens of empty mason jars that still smell very strongly of alcohol — it feels emptier now that Sabal has left.

All the windows are shuttered, but the wind still manages to occasionally gust through the cracks in the old wood, sending the ceiling lamp swaying and causing all the shadows in the room to fall differently. Ajay closes his eyes against the shifting light, swallows spit and tries not to think about red petals falling through the air. Instead, he thinks of Sabal's hands on his face, his own fingers gripping the blades of grass still wet with dew, vivid green just like Sabal's eyes, and it helps.

He peels off his gloves, trying to touch as little of the blood stains as possible, and then he takes off his jacket and his jeans, and, after thinking about it briefly, everything else until he's left only in his underwear. He pushes all his bloody clothes together in a pile and tries not to look at them.

One of the drawers of the dresser Sabal pointed out to him contains shirts and the other jeans — all of them clean, but all of them frayed, faded and torn. He rifles through them for a while until he finds a shirt that's not too tight in the shoulders and jeans that go past his ankles and have the least amount of holes, and he pulls them on. The fabric of the shirt is a coarse, much-washed flax that itches slightly when he moves, and the sleeves reach barely halfway down his forearms. It has the symbol of the Golden Path spray painted in yellow across the back, and as he pulls the shirt close around himself to button it, Ajay can almost feel the weight of it on his shoulders. Just until his clothes are clean, he thinks. Then he'll take it off.

The jeans are stiff and tight, with large brownish stains that no amount of washing seems to have got rid of and that Ajay hopes are just mud, and tries not to think about how they're probably old blood. The door opens as he's zipping them up to let in Sabal. He's carrying a pewter basin full of water, and he pushes the door shut with his foot, trying not to spill any of the water.

"Here's some—" he starts, and then he looks at Ajay, and he stops. His eyes move over the torn jeans, the faded shirt, to the yellow armband Ajay is holding in his hands, and then to Ajay's face, and his expression is astonished, like he's seeing Ajay for the first time.

"I thought I'd better put this on, too," Ajay says, gesturing vaguely with the armband. "So that people know who I am." The fabric of the armband is softer than the shirt, brighter, a yellow that's worn, but still cared for, like a garland of half-wilted marigolds. 

At that, Sabal smiles, like Ajay just told a joke that's not particularly funny, but he's indulging him anyway. "I don't think there is anyone in Kyrat who doesn't know who you are, brother," he says. He walks over to the table and sets the basin on it, the water sloshing over the sides and wetting his hands as he does. "I'll help you put it on," he says. "It's difficult with one hand."

Ajay pulls the left sleeve of his shirt down, keeping the fabric taut so that it doesn't bunch up as Sabal slides the armband up his arm and over his bicep. He ties it tight so that it doesn't slip off, taking special care that it's folded the right way, smooth and without any creases.

The way the fabric of the shirt drags along the skin of his arm, the way the armband tightens around his muscles, it feels like he's wearing a decades old war.

"I wish your father could see you like this," says Sabal. "You are living Mohan's legacy, you know. This is what he wanted for you."

Prickles of anxiety climb Ajay's spine like spiders at Sabal's words. Sabal is standing so close Ajay can see the way the green swirls into gold swirls into brown in his irises, and the only thing Ajay lets escape from his mouth is a quiet sigh. Anything he might say — _I never knew my father, I'm not my father_ — would make Sabal move, and him being there is the one thing that helped Ajay claw his way back to reality, that helped him drag his mind away from that cave.

So he says nothing.

Sabal smooths his sleeve down, fingers sliding over cloth and skin in a gesture that's as unnecessary as it is gentle. It's different, like the way he looked at Ajay when he first walked into the room was different. Sabal has always touched him with resolute hands that didn't leave any room for doubt Ajay would stay where he was, lean in close like there was no need for personal space between them. Now, he touches him the way he clasps his hands in prayer.

Sabal places a hand on Ajay's chest, palm over his heart, and says "You are a true Kyrati now."

Ajay's heart is a panicked bird, hitting against the bars of his ribcage and struggling to be let out. If it could, it would jump out into Sabal's hand, and Sabal would hold it in his palm, push it into his mouth and swallow it whole.

The syrupy remains of Yuma's drugs cling to the whorls of his brain, stick to the backs of his eyes. Sabal looks at him and his eyes slide down to Ajay's mouth, and his lips part.

Ajay can feel Sabal's blood heave in his fingers, pushing at his fingertips and thumping out a heartbeat to match Ajay's own, just like how he can feel the weight of the war on his back, the caress of the marigolds around his arm. And the war presses uncomfortably against his shoulder blades, and the marigolds make his skin pull and itch, but Sabal's hand on his heart spreads warmth through him that soothes the ache in his head.

The prayer beads around Sabal's wrist dig into Ajay's palm as he closes his hand over it, right hand on right hand. And Sabal leans in close like he bows to Kyra, and he kisses him like he chants mantras — focused, sure, and ardent.

Sabal kisses like he can't help himself. Hand at Ajay's hip, his fingers pushing under Ajay's shirt, Sabal touches his skin the way he turns his thumb around each bead when he prays, smooth and second nature, without needing to think about it, because he's gone through the motions so many times already, in his head and in his heart, that his hands remember everything. 

Ajay kisses like it's the only thing he knows is real.

And the seconds add up, and the warmth in Ajay's chest spreads from a glow to a roar, and when Sabal separates their mouths to give him breathing room, his hands are in Ajay's hair and Ajay's spit is on his lips, and for a moment that's just long enough that Ajay has time to notice it, his eyes are turned down towards the ground, supplicating. And then Sabal's eyes are back on his, the green of the grass swirling into marigold swirling into soil brown, and Ajay leans in again, still out of breath, kissing the corners of his mouth, and then his lips, and then slicking his tongue against Sabal's when his lips part and let him in, trying to memorise his taste.

There's a knot in his chest that tells him when he replaces the Golden Path uniform with his own clothes, everything will change — but for now, he has this, Sabal pliant under his fingers and under his tongue. 

"This is real, right?" he asks, just to be sure, lips against Sabal's cheek, eyes closed.

"Yes," says Sabal — a breath, barely a whisper. Ajay's fingers trace the curve of his neck, feeling his heartbeat pick up, and he trusts him.


End file.
